He shifted and unstuck himself from the seat. He wore that vague, post-hundred-kilometer-an-hour-car-crash look. Blood was oozing down the left side of his face from a ragged gash over his eyebrow—bleeding so profusely, she could hear it trickling.
No. She shook her head, trying to clear her brain. Not blood.
Gas.
And the engine was still sparking.
She jerked in sudden realization, instantly clear-headed.
“Ellsworth!” she barked. “Let go of me! Get up!” She covered his fist with her own and tore herself free. They had to escape, and fast. “Come on! We’ve gotta get out!”
He sat back, trying to hitch his butt onto the seat again.
She struggled to sit up in the tight space, got her feet beneath her, and grabbed his lapels. “Ellsworth!” She shook him, her face an inch from his.
“Cheesh,” he said, tipping sideways, throwing out a hand to catch himself. “A polite request—”
She shoved him toward the shattered side window. The van was as crumpled as a beer can on Super Bowl Sunday. No way any of the doors was going to open. “Out the window!” She shoved him like a heavy duffel bag. “Out! We’re gonna ignite!”
The manhandling got his attention. His eyes lost their glaze. “Holy God,” he said. He dove out head first, arms outstretched, and tumbled onto the road.
Gas vapors filled the van.
The camera. Brenna leaped into the back seat. It was cushioned, solidly lodged between the other two bags. Good. She grasped the bag handles and yanked. Bad. The van had accordion-pleated. They were jammed.
“The kid!” he shouted, staggering unsteadily, hauling vainly against the front passenger door, trying to reach the young driver.
“He’s dead!” she shouted, yanking at the camera. Without it, there was no point being in Kavsak.
“Get out,” he ordered.
“I need. The fucking. Camera.” She snarled each word, yanking the hell out of the jammed tangle.
He fished through the window for her. “Get. Out.”
The bags broke free. “Bloody right.” She tossed them out, one after the other. “Take them! Run!”
“No. You.”
She plopped her butt on the seat, stuck her feet out the window, and clutched the camera to her chest. Ellsworth had no commitment to it. No way she was handing it off. “Pull me!” she shouted.
“Christ! The glass—”
The window frame was bristling with it.
“Pull, goddamit!”
He grabbed her ankles and hauled.
She slid forward. Her shirt pulled out of her pants and the shards raked her bare back.
She hit the ground. “Go! Go! Go!”
He grabbed the duffels and pounded after her.
A wall of intense heat flared up behind her with a whoomf. A fireball blasted outward. The concussion shoved her forward. She stumbled, trying to keep her feet beneath her.
In the periphery of her vision, she saw Ellsworth and the bags bouncing over the cobblestones like dice cast across a casino table.
She lost her footing, twisted, fell on her hip, and rolled, fighting the instinct to throw out her hands. Tuck in, she told herself. Don’t let go of the camera.
She came to rest a scant three feet from the sunshine. Above her, a banner erected by civilians marked the boundary between concealment and sniper sightlines. “Pazi, Snajper!” it warned. She scrambled back, deeper into the safety of the shadows, camera clutched to her belly.
Daniel landed in the shadows, face up, eyeglasses hooked over one ear, grabbing at the frigid cobblestones with outflung arms while the reeling planet tried to toss him off. Thick black smoke billowed above him, spewing debris. A blizzard looked like this from below. But these weren’t big fluffy flakes. They were red.
Embers.
He closed his eyes—a moment too late.
Oh, Jesus.
He rolled onto his knees, ripped his glasses the rest of the way off. His eyes were burning, on fire. He stuck his filthy knuckles into his eye sockets and dug frantically. Jesus.
Cool strong fingers circled his wrists.
“Stop,” Brenna ordered. “It makes it worse.”
He yanked his frenzied hands away from her and screwed his knuckles in again.
“Do you have any diseases?” she asked, capturing his wrists once more and gripping them with surprising strength. “Hepatitis? HIV?”
He fought her.
“Answer me!” she commanded, lurching with him as he struggled. Her voice was hard and impatient.
The edge in it cut through his panic. He’d heard that tone before. She’d used it in his office. I will turn my back on you and walk away. Everything went dark inside him. Brenna Rease had no commitment to him, no reason to inconvenience herself for him. She could desert him, blind and alone, in a city at war.
“Dammit, Ellsworth, I’m trying to help you!”
Help? A growl rumbled through his chest. Help was 9-1-1, not an interrogation about his medical history—or was it? The purpose of her questions dawned on him. His face was awash in blood. If he were infected and she came into contact with it, she’d die as surely as the boy in the van. Everything I do is calculated.
“No,” he said. “No HIV. No—”
“Then be still,” she ordered, the testy edge vanishing from her voice, “and let me help you.”
Swiftly, before he could react, she abandoned his wrists, grasped the sides of his face, and pulled him forward like an ardent lover unable to restrain herself. He irrationally expected her mouth to meet his. Instead, it covered his left eye, warm and moist and open, her tongue laving his burning eyelid.
Miraculous relief trailed in its wake. No eye wash, no ophthalmic ointment could have worked so effectively.
She moved rapidly, tilting his face so she could lick the lid with the broad of her tongue, then again with the edge of it. He moved with her, fingertips light on her hips, no longer resisting. She spat, once, twice, off to the side, and switched to his right eye.
Her breasts brushed his chest. A moan welled inside him, originating in a different lifetime. He remembered soft. Soft was an undertow. Soft was seduction. Soft made his gonads rouse.
Her tongue quivered over the crease of his eyelid, lifting it gently now, delicately probing the rim, cleansing him of the last irritants.
Don’t think about it, his intellect warned. Don’t think about her nipples, her sensuous mouth, her—
Too late.
It wasn’t his intellect straining against his jeans.
He rocked forward, instinctively closing the meager distance between her pelvis and his own.
She faltered.
He slid his palms frankly down the curve of her hips and onto her bottom. Cupping her buttocks, he pulled her firmly forward, guiding her in the ancient dance. He heard her shaky intake of breath in his ear. Pleasure tumbled through his chest. Nearly two years, without this. He didn’t need to open his eyes any more. This sensation alone was all he needed to know.
“Ellsworth—did you fall on your head?” She put her hands on his shoulders. “This is as good as I’m planning to make you feel.”
Her voice, he noticed, was not quite steady. Breathless, in fact.
He slid his uninjured cheek down the curve of her silky face. He had her tightly, now.
“Ellsworth, dammit.” She pressed his shoulders away. “Stop.”
Untamed as he felt, he halted abruptly. Blinking hard, he came back into focus. What the hell was he doing?
She grabbed a handful of his shirt and tugged. “Come on. We’re in the middle of the road.”
He scrambled after her, tugging miserably at his jeans, chagrined by his inadvertent sexual impropriety.
She led him to a pile of burned-out car chasses and construction debris piled along the shaded side of the road and settled him in the same safe nook where she had stowed her camera.
“I’ll be right back.” She sprinted into the middle of th
e road to get the tote bags that had flown out of his hands when the van exploded.
Beyond her, the van crackled. His blood went cold. The corporal. Still in the flaming van.
She raced back, hefted the camera, and flipped a tiny lever on the left side panel, powering up. In seconds, she had white-balanced, verified the settings on the neutral density filter, audio recording volume, and lens aperture, and put her eye to the viewfinder, ready to shoot. Camera setup was a rite, and she was a priestess. He bet she could do it in the dark.
She squeezed the record button in the handgrip and turned the lens toward the flaming van. The electronics inside the camera began recording. Daniel remained silent. If he spoke it would ruin the soundtrack.
She got up and crossed the street to get additional shots from different angles.
He stared at the dead boy in the van. Somewhere in Alberta, Canada a ranching family’s life had just changed forever, and they didn’t even know it yet.
She returned, set the camera aside, and pulled her tote bag over. She ripped open an outer pocket and took out a first aid kit. “Take your glasses off,” she said, tearing open a foil packet with Betadyne-soaked cotton balls inside it. “Head back. I’m going to dribble some of this into the cut over your eyebrow.”
He removed his glasses, tipped his head back, and shut his eyes tightly.
She dabbed gently at the cut, spreading the skin with her fingers to make sure she disinfected as much as she could. It stung a bit, but she had a good hand.
“I thought if I got in trouble, you were going to abandon me,” he said.
The dabbing paused. “I lied.”
“I see. You do that often?”
A dribble of Betadyne ran down his temple. “Only when I’m pissed off.”
He tried to sit up.
She pushed him back. “Not yet. Let it dry a sec.”
He felt her move away, then heard the rustle of paper. He sat up and gingerly opened his right eye. She was opening an adhesive butterfly bandage. He watched her deft fingers. He needed to apologize for his sexual reaction to her, but what could he say? It had taken him as much by surprise as it surely had her.
“About what happened—”
She lined up the bandage, stuck one side down, tugged the broken skin together, and gently tapped the second wing into place. “Forget it.”
Easy for her to say. The last thing he was going to forget was her seductive body—however inappropriately he had experienced it.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We’re sitting ducks.” The medical debris drifted across the street on a gust of frigid wind. She shouldered her bags and led off.
He rose stiffly, swatted dirt from the seat of his pants, and followed.
At the southernmost enclosure of the Old City, Brenna leaned against the arched portal, watching Ellsworth’s awkward progress as he caught up with her.
He was limping, rotating his left shoulder, moving through pain. He had taken a damned hard thwack against the driver’s seat while he was serving as her human seat belt, and then he’d bounced across the cobblestones when the van ignited. Uncomfortable as he looked now, she knew that later, when he stopped moving and his body cooled down, he was going to be in a world of hurt.
And when that time came, he wasn’t going to have any homey comforts. His luggage had been destroyed. Everything he had was on his back—and Kavsak wasn’t exactly Rodeo Drive.
He drew near, caught her eye, and quickly looked away, still embarrassed.
He was so reserved, so proper. He probably hadn’t got a boner in public since high school. He didn’t understand how powerful an aphrodisiac war could be. The prospect of death brought out the primitive impulse to cling to a mate, to procreate and leave a subsequent generation before it was too late. War correspondents were infamous for fucking like bunnies.
She smiled inwardly. Stress revealed what manners concealed. Beneath the suit, she’d discovered, Ellsworth’s engine ran hot. Even on auto-pilot, the man had moves—and she was slick enough to prove it. She flushed, the heat of sexual recollection warming her despite the cold day.
Advantage, female. Unlike him, she didn’t have to admit it.
He caught up to her. She gave him a moment to catch his breath, then led on.
Civilians in the Old City—none of whom traversed the deserted streets unless it was absolutely necessary—had resourcefully stacked hulked-out cars, scrap metal, concrete slabs, and other useless construction debris into berms, creating protective barriers that shielded them from gunfire and mortar attacks the rare times they did come outside. The berms ran like solid walls for blocks at a time, even barricading street intersections.
Brenna scurried like a mouse along the bases of the blasted buildings, moving in the lee of the huge piles as rapidly as she could without opening too great a distance between herself and Ellsworth.
Overhead, she heard a sound like a freight train bearing down on her. She stopped. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she searched the sky apprehensively. The noise grew louder. Large mortar—120 millimeter, heavier than the rockets blazing across the rest of the city—roared in their direction.
She cursed, ran for a recessed doorway. Ellsworth, following her lead, squeezed in beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder.
One mississippi—it crossed above them skimming the rooftops—two mississippi...
The payload shuddered to the ground with a heavy whoomf and shook the ground. Three mississippi. Half a mile, no more. A dense black cloud billowed into the sky just north of them.
“Shit,” she mumbled. The market. Had to be.
The economic center of the city since the 14th century, the market had become a distribution point for the trickle of international relief that eluded Nationalist blockades. Today, the first dry day after ten days of rain and snow, it would be thronged.
She hitched the straps of her bags up her shoulders and ran.
Her strong thighs took her, full out, toward the column of smoke, up and over the tall berms, across rubble-strewn streets, and down side roads. And all the time she ran, dread spread through her like a poison. Her brain rebelled, issuing self-protective edicts: Don’t go. Turn back. You can’t afford to see any more of this.
Ellsworth followed hard at her heels, grunting with pain, his breath as ragged as her own.
She turned the last corner and skidded to a halt. The dark passageway that led from the street into the market lay ahead.
She shuddered. She hated the market. It was a trap. Built like a fortress, the large open area in the center courtyard was surrounded by high walls on all sides. Only four narrow, tunnel-like passageways, from the major points of the compass, allowed access to the middle. Easy enough to get into, a few people at a time, but hard to get out of, should everyone decide to leave at once. She heard panicked screams echoing off the stones in the dark passageway.
Her stomach corkscrewed downwards.
Ellsworth caught up and stumbled into her. He took one look at her face and followed her line of sight.
“Direct hit,” she said, and led off, lifting the camera to her shoulder before her resolve failed her.
The stone walls inside the tunnel radiated cold. Blinded by the contrast of the interior darkness and the brilliant light in the square, she advanced quickly but cautiously. A middle-aged woman wearing a floral-print skirt appeared mirage-like, and ran past her, babbling incoherently.
Brenna faltered, watching her pass, fighting the urge to turn around and go with her. She didn’t want to be part of the horror any more than that fleeing woman. But if she, and other journalists like her, didn’t broadcast the truth to the world, how would people know what was really going on?
Camera ready, bag straps criss-crossed guerrilla-style across her chest, she stepped out of the dank passageway and into the square. Acrid smoke gusted into her face, a flash of heat that stung her eyes then suddenly cleared, lifting the veil on the surreal scene. Civilians screaming, shouting, running, panicked. Scores of d
ead. Bloodied victims, limbs askew—or missing. Thick pools of brilliant blood spreading across the stones. A man’s foot, slipping in the slick as he tried to help another victim. Fire eating up the stalls.
She took a deep breath to steady her trembling hands, pressed the record button, and panned the scene with a wide-angle lens to obtain her establishing-shot.
She stepped forward into the center of the pandemonium, one eye glued to the viewfinder, the other orienting her peripherally. She let the camera keep recording while she turned from one grisly image to another, but stayed steady on the core footage once she framed it up. The transitions were chaotic, but in the studio, a good editor would recognize the discrete cutting points.
Trying to gain a higher vantage point, she stepped onto a hill of debris, blindly seeking a solid foothold. Moving up the pile, her foot skidded across something warm and spongy. The object rolled and thumped the inside of her ankle.
She took her eye off the viewfinder and looked down.
It was a woman’s hand, still curled around a loaf of bread. She jumped, a muffled cry of horror in her throat. The fingernails were painted with coral enamel. A gold wedding band circled her fourth finger. Shredded flesh straggled from the wrist, the tendons sticking out like wires.
She scanned the heaped bodies, looking for a middle-aged woman that matched the hand, and did not see one. Fuck. The explosion had been so powerful that severed flesh had rained back to earth far from its point of origin.
Memories bubbled like lava inside her, threatening to rise to the surface. She took a shuddering breath, and turned her lens to the severed hand, focusing the image perfectly on the chips in the nail polish.
Behind her, a hideous wail—half-human, half animal—rose above the cacophony and isolated itself in her consciousness. Keening.
Brenna remembered that blood-curdling sound.
She had made it once herself.
The camera tumbled from her shoulder and dangled uselessly at the end of her arm. She searched the square. There she was. An old woman, tendrils of thin gray hair floating out from her scarf, kneeling over a dead man. The lower part of his torso was gone.
Memory engulfed her. Oh, God.
Everything faded around her—all sight, all sound, all sensation. She was back in Tel Aviv, making love to Ari in a recessed doorway after two long weeks of separation. He was pressing her against the doorwell, back to the deserted street, intimately linked to her.
Day Three Page 8
